RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #11 (Stephen Curry)

[70sFan]

The gap between Hakeem and Curry is around 40%... illogically to big.

Why do you think that? Curry has total of 10 seasons at all-nba or higher level in my evaluation (would you give him more?), while Hakeem has 13. Three additional all-nba level seasons is a lot of value and of course Curry has no relevant longevity outside of that (only one all-star level season), while Hakeem adds 2 another all-star seasons to that.

11 vs 15 all-star+ seasons isn't 40% gap, but it's because the model isn't linear and I came up higher on Hakeem's peak than Curry's.

I see only 13 allstar season for Hakeem. 98 and 99 seasons box stats, adv stats, all +/- data, team records, PO series - all them indicate that Hakeem is done as impactful player.

How many do you have for Steph in comparison?

[eminence]

How many do you have for Steph in comparison?

10 has to be the consensus right?

[f4p]

so yes, teams do go to amazing lengths to stop curry. sometimes his teammates even get a wide open layup out of it. but his numbers go down in the playoffs. and not just points, but shooting and the warriors offense often goes down at the same time and often looks worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense) and sometimes they only survive thanks to injuries.

Okay, so I think this drills down to the crux of the point here. Decreases in box score numbers don’t really matter if teams are decreasing his box score numbers by gameplanning in a way that enables everyone else and Steph is therefore still having massive offensive impact. Your argument is basically that the additional enabling of others is not enough of a counterweight and that the Warriors offense goes down as a result. You further argue that that happens even more “against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren’t the best because of defense).”

At the outset, I think we can throw away the final point. I’ve provided data that gets at this exact question—how Steph’s offenses did against good opponents.

well you defined good as +4 SRS and whether they made the finals, even if it was a horrendous 2018 cleveland defense. and i've pointed out arguably the biggest series of steph's peak in the 2015 finals, the 2016 finals, the 2018 wcf, and the 2019 2nd round as series that either were (2015/16/18) or looked like they would be (2019) the warriors biggest series. and steph largely underperformed in all of them and his dominant team either lost (2016), won with major injury help (2015/18), or survived what looked like curry's worst series ever because KD averaged 35 ppg to keep them afloat.

I previously pointed out that, when his shooting dipped in the 2021-2022 regular season, it absolutely did affect his impact—with his offensive impact being rated easily the lowest of his prime that season by various metrics (this difference was muted at least somewhat overall, since that was also his best season defensively).

in other words, the impact metrics found a way. by all evidence of both stats and just watching him play, steph didn't seem as good in 2022 and yet the defensive component rose up so much (an amazing +4.2 from 2021 in a stat like RPM) that he still managed to finish 3rd. after another first place finish in 2021 on a team that didn't make the playoffs.

They didn’t “find a way.” Steph played the best defense of his career that season. It’s not just impact metrics saying it—it was something that was widely noticed throughout the season by peoples’ eye test. You’re basically saying that if the eye test says Steph’s offense got worse and his defense got better, then you don’t trust impact metrics unless they say his offense got worse (which they did) and *don’t* say his defense got better. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and is obviously unfair. This argument that impact metrics on Steph can’t be trusted because they aren’t responsive to his actual play on the court is just objectively wrong, and in fact you’re now essentially asserting that they’re wrong because they *were* responsive to his actual play on the court. It seems like you just *want* them to be wrong.

i would say it's the very definitely of "find a way." these are steph's DRPM's leading up to and after 2022:

2018: -2.89
2019: -0.97
2021: 0.10
2022: +4.3!
2023: -1.48

so he never gets above 0.10 in any season and then, in year 13, just spikes to an elite defender with a massive +4.2 jump from the previous year before a -5.8 decline back the next year. just in time to save his worst offensive season and declare him the 3rd best player, even in a down year. granted, it was kind of a banner year in the curry household, with brother seth posting a +2.7, though he lost out to russell westbrook's +3.0. and they all lost out to defensive stalwart tyrese maxey's +4.74. admittedly, all of the DRPM's from that year are way above normal for the top guys so something seems to have changed in the calculation to inflate defense. but all that means is that if the calcs were the same as previous years, steph would have gone back down to his usual +0 in defense and be right back up there in offense. still 3rd overall.

is that the argument, even in a down year in year 13, steph is still 3rd best? if so, then it would appear he was like easily the best for a decade (which is what RPM says), or at worst just a smidge behind our project #1 lebron, and we should have voted him in way before this. and yet i don't appear alone in waiting until now to start considering him. because, much like with a few other players, the reality, even if it's really good, doesn't quite seem to measure up to what these impact metrics say.

What is objected to is the more general assertion that he is much less impactful in the playoffs in general.

but if he's not, then why did the warriors lose in 2016? why did their +10 team in 2015 need injury luck to beat a cavs team where lebron was busy posting a sub-50 TS% playoffs and so we can't even claim that it was just some peak lebron performance? why did the most talented roster ever need chris paul to get hurt (i realize the warriors slacked off in the regular season and had a worse SRS but no one thinks they were the worse team)? why did they weirdly struggle with a worse version of the rockets in 2019 if steph's impact was still right there and KD was going off for most of the series? i mean at full throttle in the playoffs, these would seem to be easy wins for the warriors if steph's impact is as great as the regular season numbers would indicate.

so i would say nba history says that the nba is predictable. "team with lots of talent in their primes, who all fit together" tends to be "team who wins" in most seasons. mikan won 7 of 8. russell won 11 of 13. jordan 6 of 6 or 6 of 7. magic and bird basically traded off 8 out of 9. the warriors got 3 very good players all with completely overlapping primes and then threw iggy on top of it and then threw durant on top of that. to go back to the steph/draymond synergy, not only did the warriors have that going for them, but then the 3rd member of the triumvirate, the 2nd offensive option, also happened to be one of his eras great off-ball players to fit perfectly with another off-ball player. and even iggy basically was just a mini-draymond like klay was a mini-steph, a high IQ point forward who was a generational wing defender. and they were all perfect for the new paradigm. a paradigm shift they helped usher in, but i tend to think of steph as the spark that lit the kindling that 10 years of 3-point analytics had laid on the forest floor. if you want to credit the front office, that's great, but these players could not have gotten luckier to have a better fit around them with perfectly overlapping primes. and again, they still got 3 years of kevin durant to replace their weakest position and with their biggest need in isolation scoring.

they absolutely should have wrecked the league like they did. their biggest consistent competition was lebron. yes, lebron just finished #1 in this project and was epic, but i think we can safely say, years later, that kyrie irving doesn't seem like the best winner ever and kevin love practically became obsolete the day steph launched his first 30 foot three in 2015. and they arguably got lucky to beat that team 2 out of 3 thanks to injuries. and their other big opponent was the 2018 rockets, and well, they were losing to them until chris paul got injured.

This strikes me as some post-hoc reasoning regarding the Warriors being so good. You’re in large part saying they were so good because Iguodala is a “mini-draymond” and Klay is a “mini-Steph.” But is that even a good thing? One can easily imagine that if they did not have success people might’ve said that that was a huge reason for it—that there was too much redundancy in the skill sets of the players. I think we should be careful about basically deciding that a player was destined to win because of really squishy reasons like this.

except it's not really redundancy when it all fits together. i think everyone would agree that steph and draymond are as perfect a pairing as we've essentially ever seen. maybe more talented duos, but certainly not better fitting. not only in their fit together, but how they fit into the league as a whole. klay and iggy just gives you more of a good thing. klay wasn't an on-ball player who needed his touches, he just happened to basically have the same off-ball skillset as curry. not because curry decided to become an off-ball player to help klay and draymond, but just because that's who he was. and that's who they were. and iggy's ability to pass the ball and play elite defense is basically impossible to be redundant. the only thing missing from iggy and draymond is shooting and then at that point, if they could shoot, the warriors would basically just be a perfect/unbeatable roster. and of course, this version of the warriors actually did lose and then got the one thing they might have been missing in iso scoring with KD, who then somehow got criticized as being unnecessary after he turned them into a juggernaut.

and even if you think the non-KD teams weren't super talented, who was supposed to beat them? the west of 2015 had harden somehow dragging the rockets to a #2 seed at 56 wins and then had the clippers with their usual injuries and a typical good-but-not-great memphis team. i guess the spurs maybe could have beaten them but they didn't even get there to face them. same with the 2016 spurs. and the team they lost to in the cavs had one player in love who was practically a liability by the time the finals rolled around.

[penbeast0]

OKAY, CALLING IT FOR STEPHEN CURRY, NOMINATION OSCAR ROBERTSON. HERE ARE THE FINAL VOTES:

lessthanjake: Curry/Bird, nominate Moses

penbeast0: Curry/Mikan, David Robinson

Samurai: Curry/Bid, Oscar

iggymcfrack: Curry/Bird, Robinson

Gibson22: West/Curry, Oscar

One_and_Done: Curry/Bird, Robinson

trelos6: Curry/Bird, Robinson

ZeppelinPage: West/--, Oscar

rk2023: Kobe/--, Oscar

HeartbreakKid: West/Bird, Oscar

Narigo: Bird/Kobe, Oscar

Aenigma: Kobe/--, Oscar

eminence: Mikan/West, Oscar

ceiling raiser: Curry/Kobe, Oscar

DraymondGold: Curry/Bird, Oscar

OldSchoolNoBull: Mikan/Bird, Barkley

f4p: Kobe/--, Robinson

Clyde Frazier: Bird/Kobe, –

trex_8063: Kobe/Bird, Karl Malone

OhayoKD: Kobe/Curry, Robinson

falcolombardi: Kobe/--, –

ljspeelman: Curry/--. Robinson

DoctorMJ: Curry/Bird, Oscar

Dr Positivity: Kobe/Curry, Dirk

ShaqAttack: Mikan/Curry, Oscar

[SpreeS]

Why do you think that? Curry has total of 10 seasons at all-nba or higher level in my evaluation (would you give him more?), while Hakeem has 13. Three additional all-nba level seasons is a lot of value and of course Curry has no relevant longevity outside of that (only one all-star level season), while Hakeem adds 2 another all-star seasons to that.

11 vs 15 all-star+ seasons isn't 40% gap, but it's because the model isn't linear and I came up higher on Hakeem's peak than Curry's.

I see only 13 allstar season for Hakeem. 98 and 99 seasons box stats, adv stats, all +/- data, team records, PO series - all them indicate that Hakeem is done as impactful player.

How many do you have for Steph in comparison?

We could agree that Curry has 10 and Hakeem 13 All Star+ seasons. Dabate is about Curry 10/11 and Hakeem 98/99 seasons.

Hakeem 98/99

HOU drtg 25th (98) and 15th (99) in RS.
HOU PO rdrtg (98/99) +2.6 lower than lg avg

As defensive force Hakeem days were over, thats for sure.

PO (98/99) showed how washed Hakeem was

in 314min -9.8nrtg
out 118min +10.1nrtg

TS .453
WS/48 .045
BPM 1.1

Curry 10/11

GSW was Monta team who said cleary that he dont want to play with Curry. The situation was awkward for Curry. The rookie is not loved by the team leader...but we have numbers!

10/11/12

League avg ortg 106.77
Monta w/o Curry 2750min -6.88 nrtg 104.66 ortg
Monta w Curry 4489min -3.66 nrtg 108.09 ortg
Curry w/o Monta 1628min +4.89 nrtg 112.91 ortg +6.14 rOrtg

Curry from day one had huge impact on offensive end, but Monta egoism prevented us from seeing it. Maybe these two first Curry seasons would look way different with Ralph Sampson over Monta.

I could agree to give one more Allstar + season to both them, but Hakeem doesnt deserve 2nd one.

[f4p]

To me you're saying here that you'd get it if Steph's numbers changed like an on-ball player's numbers would be expected to change if the defensive pressure on him compelled him to pass, but with Steph playing a distinct role where there is no such box score transition you're left feeling like Steph's just getting stopped and thus less valuable.

To which I'd say: The nature of the rover position is that anyone used to traditional box score methods of analysis will likely underrate the player's impact in such circumstances. Because if your job is to get a shot by roving, and the defensive pressure is so extreme this is prevented, it means you're not getting the ball rather than getting it and passing it. To the box score, the player looks as if he's doing nothing...but the box score is wrong. He's constantly running and distorting the defense which allows other players better opportunities, that just don't show up on his personal box score.

okay, but again i don't think we can just treat steph as some sort of non-box score player. he has regular season numbers that make hakeem look like he forgot how to play basketball. yes, teams try different things in the playoffs, but teams aren't just running 2 guys around with steph for 48 straight minutes in the playoffs while kevin durant takes wide open 3's. steph gets the ball, a lot. steph still runs the same PnR-trap-get ball to draymond for 4v3, a lot. steph could theoretically isolate almost any time he wants and i honestly think he should have done it more. maybe it's like the previous project post, and he just couldn't. even for guys who have the ball a lot, the defense isn't just directly forcing more assists and less shots. they are coming up with novel approaches to try to limit those guys, even their assists after they pass.

Oh I'm not suggesting that we should ignore Curry's box score, but consider this:

In the regular season, Curry has a career WS/48 of .203.
In the post-season, Curry has a career WS/48 of .190.

Keep in mind that aside from the fact that this really isn't a big drop, it still puts Curry as 16th in history by WS/48 rate in the playoffs by bkref's list.

so we can't do that because steph missed the playoffs his first 3 years, which dragged down his regular season WS48 and didn't affect his playoff numbers. by the same calc where i had steph 32nd out of 38 in playoff resiliency, if i just limited it to WS48, then steph would have been 31st out of 38, so barely any change.

In general what I'd say is that a metric like this should never be expected to capture Curry's impact, and if you're talking about playoffs making a dent in those regular season numbers, a drop like this is pretty understandable.

so the average player does indeed drop in WS48 in the playoffs. after all, there is only 1 win share for every game played and if you have to share it with a playoff team instead of an average team, then it will go down. but steph still drops worse than normal. and WS48 is actually a very favorable steph stat. it loves efficiency and loves when your teammates are good at defense. it's the perfect metric for steph to dominate.

2. Refusing to use all the tools we have for modern players simply because we don't have them for historical players is tying your hands behind your back. It's one thing if you literally don't believe in the value of what we call impact metrics, but if you see the value in the concept, you should use it where you have it.

so i definitely believe in them less than most here. or at least find them so noisy and situation dependent that i don't know how much to trust them. again, this isn't steph-specific. i've never seen a david robinson impact number or plus/minus number that says we shouldn't have him like top 5. even after his injury, in his first 4 years with duncan, he literally has the highest 4 year playoff APM ever. so he even excels in the playoffs. and yet he'll be doing good to finish in the top 20, here on a board that loves impact metrics. because i assume people don't really find the end result to be reflective of the impact numbers. presumably to a pretty large degree to get robinson as low as he will be.

and when i say situation-specific, since you keep bringing up kerr's offense. i think it's fair to say it's tailor made to steph. and since you guys agree steph is fairly unique, i think it's tailor-made to him in a way that the rest of the team is probably never going to be able to look as good when steph is off and they keep running the offense. especially for someone like durant who can save the warriors bacon when they need an iso bucket in the finals but isn't going to look as good in the day to day on/off stuff because he doesn't fit in the same way steph does. now does that mean they shouldn't run that offense? no. but is it possible that it being a somewhat novel offense for a novel player makes it harder to replicate for the rest of the team and inflates steph's impact numbers?

Re: Irving & Love not actually that impressive. I do think you should look at what their shooting numbers looked like in those playoffs. I'd argue they got pretty lucky, but if we assume there was no luck, the Cavs had some great shooting on the floor far beyond what the Jordan Bulls could muster, just as an example.

sure, irving shot well in the finals, but he would seem to be a guy who has only ever shown he could win next to lebron. but i guess the warriors faced the version who was next to lebron so maybe it evens out. but love, that guy had 36/26 shooting splits in the finals and was a massive defensive liability. that's rough to overcome from your 3rd best player and you wouldn't expect a team with a terrible performance from their 3rd best player to pull off a big upset.

In the last 20 years, we've watched this game transform in a way that's unparalleled unless you go all the way back to the 40s-60s duration, and the result is that all of these teams are better on average than what came before. How can you see that happen and come away so skeptical that the best of the bunch has been doing something amazing?

i mean it's all relative, right? the warriors are also better than older teams as well. i don't think the newer era somehow prevents a team that has accumulated a lot of talent from being the best team in the league for a while. just like i don't think anything stopped a team in the 70's from dominating. the talent just got spread around instead of concentrated. no amount of variance is keeping a team with 3 future hall of famers playing their entire primes together and an unlimited payroll for role players from being good for a long time.

Big thing: It ain't mediocrity. All these teams would win most games against any of those other eras.

i don't understand this comment. it sounds like we're just saying older players are worse in an absolute sense. i agree, but that doesn't seem to be how we look at things on this board or in this project. otherwise we are going to end up with a drastically different top 100 that should mostly be devoid of anyone from before the last 20 or 30 years.

The only reason why we shouldn't take +/- data to be THE defining estimation of player value in that context is noise.
That noise is a very real and massive concern...but when you're talking about something that's "seemingly always" happening, it starts becoming very problematic to chalk it up to noise.

it's more than impact metrics seem to pick winners and losers. i don't know if it's the prior informed thing or just team-specific things in the way certain guys fit their situation. but it seems some guys rise to the top and are just always there, like your garnett's or curry's, and some guys, even guys who have won a lot and are playoff risers and seemingly do everything you would want in a winner, aren't viewed as well. you even get someone like a kyle lowry in RPM who popped up high one year and then had a great ride through the mid-2010's and early 2020's, culminating in him finishing #1 in 2018, a bonkers result. but hardly less bonkers than him finishing just ahead of #3 fred van vleet from his own team. was there something in the water in toronto that year or could the numbers just not figure out what to do? now kyle lowry's a fine player who does lots of winning things, but he "always" finished way up high in a way that i don't think reflects his true value. kobe finished #73 in 25 year RAPM i believe. since he'll probably finish like 13th in this project, it appears no one is taking that 73rd place finish very seriously.

now maybe the metrics are right. maybe it's as simple as them being way better than everything else. maybe i just get the value of a player's teammates and their opponents way wrong, and what appears to be a guy carrying a team to a championship is really more to do with his teammates and i just can't see it. but there's enough conflicting info from where i sit, that the impact metrics are going to have to show me more before i trust them more than i do. others will disagree, i suppose.

[f4p]

I see only 13 allstar season for Hakeem. 98 and 99 seasons box stats, adv stats, all +/- data, team records, PO series - all them indicate that Hakeem is done as impactful player.

How many do you have for Steph in comparison?

We could agree that Curry has 10 and Hakeem 13 All Star+ seasons. Dabate is about Curry 10/11 and Hakeem 98/99 seasons.

Hakeem 98/99

HOU drtg 25th (98) and 15th (99) in RS.
HOU PO rdrtg (98/99) +2.6 lower than lg avg

As defensive force Hakeem days were over, thats for sure.

PO (98/99) showed how washed Hakeem was

so you're kind of smushing different things together and also ingoring the opponents.

for one thing, 1999 hakeem averaged 19 ppg, 9.5 rpg, and 2.5 bpg and finished 3rd-team all-nba. 23.1 PER, 0.175 WS48, 3.2 BPM. numbers steph wouldn't even come close to getting in 2010 or 2011 and even in 2012 only BPM exceeds any of those numbers. steph also didn't have a playoffs to disappoint in because he didn't make the playoffs while hakeem's opponent in 1999 was...prime Shaq. damn near peak shaq. on a rockets team where hakeem was literally the only guy over 6'9 to guard shaq. and the 6'9 option was 37 year old antoine carr who averaged an astonishing 19 fouls per 36 minutes in that series and so could only play 10 minutes per game.

so it was left to 36 year old hakeem to basically take on prime shaq on his own. even the spurs did everything they could to limit someone like prime duncan from guarding shaq and here 36 year old hakeem is going it alone. as might be predicted, it didn't go great. i don't know exactly what the perimeter equivalent of 1999 Shaq is but this would basically be like 2010 or 2011 steph showing up to the playoffs and being told he's his team's only option to guard 1993 michael jordan for 30 minutes a game. also, mike is going to guard him on the other end. steph would get annihilated.

even then, as far as DRtg's go, the rockets only posted a +1.6 rDRtg because the lakers were the 2nd best offense in the league.

1998 is kind of the reverse. bad regular season, but i'm not sure how you're getting that he was bad on defense from the playoffs. the rockets had a rDRtg of -9.0 in the 1st round against the #1 offense jazz. and hakeem had absolutely horrendous defensive help. matt bullard and matt maloney in the starting lineup? the other starters being 35 year old drexler and 35 year old willis, with 35 year old barkley being the 6th man? there's no way that should be a -9 defense. he was simply asked to do way too much offensively where he somehow, with a 45 TS%, was the rockets best option because everyone else was basically worse.

and again, curry didn't have to prove whether he would have a good playoffs or not in 2011/12.

[Warriors Analyst]

so yes, teams do go to amazing lengths to stop curry. sometimes his teammates even get a wide open layup out of it. but his numbers go down in the playoffs. and not just points, but shooting and the warriors offense often goes down at the same time and often looks worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense) and sometimes they only survive thanks to injuries.

Okay, so I think this drills down to the crux of the point here. Decreases in box score numbers don’t really matter if teams are decreasing his box score numbers by gameplanning in a way that enables everyone else and Steph is therefore still having massive offensive impact. Your argument is basically that the additional enabling of others is not enough of a counterweight and that the Warriors offense goes down as a result. You further argue that that happens even more “against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren’t the best because of defense).”

At the outset, I think we can throw away the final point. I’ve provided data that gets at this exact question—how Steph’s offenses did against good opponents.

well you defined good as +4 SRS and whether they made the finals, even if it was a horrendous 2018 cleveland defense. and i've pointed out arguably the biggest series of steph's peak in the 2015 finals, the 2016 finals, the 2018 wcf, and the 2019 2nd round as series that either were (2015/16/18) or looked like they would be (2019) the warriors biggest series. and steph largely underperformed in all of them and his dominant team either lost (2016), won with major injury help (2015/18), or survived what looked like curry's worst series ever because KD averaged 35 ppg to keep them afloat.

in other words, the impact metrics found a way. by all evidence of both stats and just watching him play, steph didn't seem as good in 2022 and yet the defensive component rose up so much (an amazing +4.2 from 2021 in a stat like RPM) that he still managed to finish 3rd. after another first place finish in 2021 on a team that didn't make the playoffs.

They didn’t “find a way.” Steph played the best defense of his career that season. It’s not just impact metrics saying it—it was something that was widely noticed throughout the season by peoples’ eye test. You’re basically saying that if the eye test says Steph’s offense got worse and his defense got better, then you don’t trust impact metrics unless they say his offense got worse (which they did) and *don’t* say his defense got better. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and is obviously unfair. This argument that impact metrics on Steph can’t be trusted because they aren’t responsive to his actual play on the court is just objectively wrong, and in fact you’re now essentially asserting that they’re wrong because they *were* responsive to his actual play on the court. It seems like you just *want* them to be wrong.

i would say it's the very definitely of "find a way." these are steph's DRPM's leading up to and after 2022:

2018: -2.89
2019: -0.97
2021: 0.10
2022: +4.3!
2023: -1.48

so he never gets above 0.10 in any season and then, in year 13, just spikes to an elite defender with a massive +4.2 jump from the previous year before a -5.8 decline back the next year. just in time to save his worst offensive season and declare him the 3rd best player, even in a down year. granted, it was kind of a banner year in the curry household, with brother seth posting a +2.7, though he lost out to russell westbrook's +3.0. and they all lost out to defensive stalwart tyrese maxey's +4.74. admittedly, all of the DRPM's from that year are way above normal for the top guys so something seems to have changed in the calculation to inflate defense. but all that means is that if the calcs were the same as previous years, steph would have gone back down to his usual +0 in defense and be right back up there in offense. still 3rd overall.

is that the argument, even in a down year in year 13, steph is still 3rd best? if so, then it would appear he was like easily the best for a decade (which is what RPM says), or at worst just a smidge behind our project #1 lebron, and we should have voted him in way before this. and yet i don't appear alone in waiting until now to start considering him. because, much like with a few other players, the reality, even if it's really good, doesn't quite seem to measure up to what these impact metrics say.

What is objected to is the more general assertion that he is much less impactful in the playoffs in general.

but if he's not, then why did the warriors lose in 2016? why did their +10 team in 2015 need injury luck to beat a cavs team where lebron was busy posting a sub-50 TS% playoffs and so we can't even claim that it was just some peak lebron performance? why did the most talented roster ever need chris paul to get hurt (i realize the warriors slacked off in the regular season and had a worse SRS but no one thinks they were the worse team)? why did they weirdly struggle with a worse version of the rockets in 2019 if steph's impact was still right there and KD was going off for most of the series? i mean at full throttle in the playoffs, these would seem to be easy wins for the warriors if steph's impact is as great as the regular season numbers would indicate.

so i would say nba history says that the nba is predictable. "team with lots of talent in their primes, who all fit together" tends to be "team who wins" in most seasons. mikan won 7 of 8. russell won 11 of 13. jordan 6 of 6 or 6 of 7. magic and bird basically traded off 8 out of 9. the warriors got 3 very good players all with completely overlapping primes and then threw iggy on top of it and then threw durant on top of that. to go back to the steph/draymond synergy, not only did the warriors have that going for them, but then the 3rd member of the triumvirate, the 2nd offensive option, also happened to be one of his eras great off-ball players to fit perfectly with another off-ball player. and even iggy basically was just a mini-draymond like klay was a mini-steph, a high IQ point forward who was a generational wing defender. and they were all perfect for the new paradigm. a paradigm shift they helped usher in, but i tend to think of steph as the spark that lit the kindling that 10 years of 3-point analytics had laid on the forest floor. if you want to credit the front office, that's great, but these players could not have gotten luckier to have a better fit around them with perfectly overlapping primes. and again, they still got 3 years of kevin durant to replace their weakest position and with their biggest need in isolation scoring.

they absolutely should have wrecked the league like they did. their biggest consistent competition was lebron. yes, lebron just finished #1 in this project and was epic, but i think we can safely say, years later, that kyrie irving doesn't seem like the best winner ever and kevin love practically became obsolete the day steph launched his first 30 foot three in 2015. and they arguably got lucky to beat that team 2 out of 3 thanks to injuries. and their other big opponent was the 2018 rockets, and well, they were losing to them until chris paul got injured.

This strikes me as some post-hoc reasoning regarding the Warriors being so good. You’re in large part saying they were so good because Iguodala is a “mini-draymond” and Klay is a “mini-Steph.” But is that even a good thing? One can easily imagine that if they did not have success people might’ve said that that was a huge reason for it—that there was too much redundancy in the skill sets of the players. I think we should be careful about basically deciding that a player was destined to win because of really squishy reasons like this.

except it's not really redundancy when it all fits together. i think everyone would agree that steph and draymond are as perfect a pairing as we've essentially ever seen. maybe more talented duos, but certainly not better fitting. not only in their fit together, but how they fit into the league as a whole. klay and iggy just gives you more of a good thing. klay wasn't an on-ball player who needed his touches, he just happened to basically have the same off-ball skillset as curry. not because curry decided to become an off-ball player to help klay and draymond, but just because that's who he was. and that's who they were. and iggy's ability to pass the ball and play elite defense is basically impossible to be redundant. the only thing missing from iggy and draymond is shooting and then at that point, if they could shoot, the warriors would basically just be a perfect/unbeatable roster. and of course, this version of the warriors actually did lose and then got the one thing they might have been missing in iso scoring with KD, who then somehow got criticized as being unnecessary after he turned them into a juggernaut.

and even if you think the non-KD teams weren't super talented, who was supposed to beat them? the west of 2015 had harden somehow dragging the rockets to a #2 seed at 56 wins and then had the clippers with their usual injuries and a typical good-but-not-great memphis team. i guess the spurs maybe could have beaten them but they didn't even get there to face them. same with the 2016 spurs. and the team they lost to in the cavs had one player in love who was practically a liability by the time the finals rolled around.

Hopping in to address some of these points: with both teams fully healthy in 2016, the Warriors were 3-0 in the Finals against the Cavs. The Cavs' only win in the first four games of that series came in a game that Love missed. That game featured RJeff at the 4 and I believe it marked a turning point in the series because it pushed the Cavs towards small-ball lineups that matched up quite well with the Warriors. And of course, Bogut going down --> more minutes for Ezeli and Varejao, Iguodala was pretty beat up at that point too and you have the Barnes 5-32 shooting in games 5-7 of the Finals. My point here is that the Cavs had their fair amount of luck in that 2016 Finals as well, but with that said, in the only 3 games we saw both teams fully healthy in the 2015 and 2016 Finals, the Warriors won handily and I genuinely believe that the Warriors would have benefited immensely from a healthy Love in the 2015 Finals, especially as the Cavs didn't have the wing depth to go small against the Warriors. In those first games of the 2016 Finals, the Warriors carved up the Cavs' defense. Love wasn't very useful defensively. In games 1 and 2, Steph takes just 26 shots and the Warriors' offense still hummed.

With regards to the Rockets series, I think KD was a double-edged sword with those matchups. The Warriors' offense was bogging down early in the 2018 series because KD was chasing mid-post ISO's. There's that infamous clip from that series off Kerr telling KD he needs to trust his teammates. Lo and behold, the Warriors get the ball in Steph's hands in the final games of the series and the offense starts humming again with KD in a more peripheral play-finishing role, rather than play-initiating. It's also worth noting that Iguodala missed the final four games of that series and I think there's a pretty significant chance that the series ends earlier with him healthy. As for the 2019 Rockets' series, the Warriors' struggles again, I think were tied in part to KD. With KD healthy, I thought it was a coin-flip series. When he went down, I and many other Warriors fans felt weirdly confident that the Warriors would win that series. For all of KD's considerable shot-making skills, his ego was definitely getting in the way of his performance in the 2018 and 2019 playoffs. My armchair psychoanalysis is that KD not getting the adulation he thought he deserved after 2017 made him more thirsty for credit, which led to him doing his own thing at inopportune times at the expense of the Warriors' standard operating procedure. Against the Cavs, who were nowhere as talented as the 2018 Rockets, it didn't matter as much. But the Rockets' ability to put Tucker on KD and goad him into ISO's at the expense of the Warriors' ball movement was a particular form of kryptonite for the Warriors.

To that point, in the 2019 WCSF you have that unbelievable fourth quarter of Game 6 where Steph puts the Rockets away spamming empty corner PNR's with Draymond. There were only two possessions where the Warriors did not score on those PNR's. If I recall, one of them was a lob or finish with enough contact that a foul could have been called. The Warriors were able to turn to and spam that PNR specifically because KD wasn't on the court clapping for the ball so he could vibe from the mid-post/baseline. KD is a great shot maker and can shoot over anyone but in terms of decision trees, a Curry empty-corner PNR with Dray has infinitely more outcomes: a Steph/Dray DHO, Steph ISO'ing after a switch, Dray getting a layup or hitting a shooter on the roll, Dray throwing a lob to the dunker spot cutter, so on and so forth. By comparison, KD getting the ball in the mid-post is probably going to end in a contested shot for KD and if he wants to pass the ball, he's got a much more limited expanse of the court to choose from.

[f4p]

Spoiler:

Okay, so I think this drills down to the crux of the point here. Decreases in box score numbers don’t really matter if teams are decreasing his box score numbers by gameplanning in a way that enables everyone else and Steph is therefore still having massive offensive impact. Your argument is basically that the additional enabling of others is not enough of a counterweight and that the Warriors offense goes down as a result. You further argue that that happens even more “against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren’t the best because of defense).”

At the outset, I think we can throw away the final point. I’ve provided data that gets at this exact question—how Steph’s offenses did against good opponents.

well you defined good as +4 SRS and whether they made the finals, even if it was a horrendous 2018 cleveland defense. and i've pointed out arguably the biggest series of steph's peak in the 2015 finals, the 2016 finals, the 2018 wcf, and the 2019 2nd round as series that either were (2015/16/18) or looked like they would be (2019) the warriors biggest series. and steph largely underperformed in all of them and his dominant team either lost (2016), won with major injury help (2015/18), or survived what looked like curry's worst series ever because KD averaged 35 ppg to keep them afloat.

They didn’t “find a way.” Steph played the best defense of his career that season. It’s not just impact metrics saying it—it was something that was widely noticed throughout the season by peoples’ eye test. You’re basically saying that if the eye test says Steph’s offense got worse and his defense got better, then you don’t trust impact metrics unless they say his offense got worse (which they did) and *don’t* say his defense got better. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and is obviously unfair. This argument that impact metrics on Steph can’t be trusted because they aren’t responsive to his actual play on the court is just objectively wrong, and in fact you’re now essentially asserting that they’re wrong because they *were* responsive to his actual play on the court. It seems like you just *want* them to be wrong.

i would say it's the very definitely of "find a way." these are steph's DRPM's leading up to and after 2022:

2018: -2.89
2019: -0.97
2021: 0.10
2022: +4.3!
2023: -1.48

so he never gets above 0.10 in any season and then, in year 13, just spikes to an elite defender with a massive +4.2 jump from the previous year before a -5.8 decline back the next year. just in time to save his worst offensive season and declare him the 3rd best player, even in a down year. granted, it was kind of a banner year in the curry household, with brother seth posting a +2.7, though he lost out to russell westbrook's +3.0. and they all lost out to defensive stalwart tyrese maxey's +4.74. admittedly, all of the DRPM's from that year are way above normal for the top guys so something seems to have changed in the calculation to inflate defense. but all that means is that if the calcs were the same as previous years, steph would have gone back down to his usual +0 in defense and be right back up there in offense. still 3rd overall.

is that the argument, even in a down year in year 13, steph is still 3rd best? if so, then it would appear he was like easily the best for a decade (which is what RPM says), or at worst just a smidge behind our project #1 lebron, and we should have voted him in way before this. and yet i don't appear alone in waiting until now to start considering him. because, much like with a few other players, the reality, even if it's really good, doesn't quite seem to measure up to what these impact metrics say.

What is objected to is the more general assertion that he is much less impactful in the playoffs in general.

but if he's not, then why did the warriors lose in 2016? why did their +10 team in 2015 need injury luck to beat a cavs team where lebron was busy posting a sub-50 TS% playoffs and so we can't even claim that it was just some peak lebron performance? why did the most talented roster ever need chris paul to get hurt (i realize the warriors slacked off in the regular season and had a worse SRS but no one thinks they were the worse team)? why did they weirdly struggle with a worse version of the rockets in 2019 if steph's impact was still right there and KD was going off for most of the series? i mean at full throttle in the playoffs, these would seem to be easy wins for the warriors if steph's impact is as great as the regular season numbers would indicate.

This strikes me as some post-hoc reasoning regarding the Warriors being so good. You’re in large part saying they were so good because Iguodala is a “mini-draymond” and Klay is a “mini-Steph.” But is that even a good thing? One can easily imagine that if they did not have success people might’ve said that that was a huge reason for it—that there was too much redundancy in the skill sets of the players. I think we should be careful about basically deciding that a player was destined to win because of really squishy reasons like this.

except it's not really redundancy when it all fits together. i think everyone would agree that steph and draymond are as perfect a pairing as we've essentially ever seen. maybe more talented duos, but certainly not better fitting. not only in their fit together, but how they fit into the league as a whole. klay and iggy just gives you more of a good thing. klay wasn't an on-ball player who needed his touches, he just happened to basically have the same off-ball skillset as curry. not because curry decided to become an off-ball player to help klay and draymond, but just because that's who he was. and that's who they were. and iggy's ability to pass the ball and play elite defense is basically impossible to be redundant. the only thing missing from iggy and draymond is shooting and then at that point, if they could shoot, the warriors would basically just be a perfect/unbeatable roster. and of course, this version of the warriors actually did lose and then got the one thing they might have been missing in iso scoring with KD, who then somehow got criticized as being unnecessary after he turned them into a juggernaut.

and even if you think the non-KD teams weren't super talented, who was supposed to beat them? the west of 2015 had harden somehow dragging the rockets to a #2 seed at 56 wins and then had the clippers with their usual injuries and a typical good-but-not-great memphis team. i guess the spurs maybe could have beaten them but they didn't even get there to face them. same with the 2016 spurs. and the team they lost to in the cavs had one player in love who was practically a liability by the time the finals rolled around.

Hopping in to address some of these points: with both teams fully healthy in 2016, the Warriors were 3-0 in the Finals against the Cavs. The Cavs' only win in the first four games of that series came in a game that Love missed. That game featured RJeff at the 4 and I believe it marked a turning point in the series because it pushed the Cavs towards small-ball lineups that matched up quite well with the Warriors.

okay, point taken, but it doesn't necessarily seem great if the other teams supposed 3rd best player becomes an afterthought and you can just replace him with "random, still moderately athletic 35 year old wing" and that's a big improvement.

And of course, Bogut going down --> more minutes for Ezeli and Varejao, Iguodala was pretty beat up at that point too and you have the Barnes 5-32 shooting in games 5-7 of the Finals. My point here is that the Cavs had their fair amount of luck in that 2016 Finals as well, but with that said, in the only 3 games we saw both teams fully healthy in the 2015 and 2016 Finals, the Warriors won handily and I genuinely believe that the Warriors would have benefited immensely from a healthy Love in the 2015 Finals, especially as the Cavs didn't have the wing depth to go small against the Warriors. In those first games of the 2016 Finals, the Warriors carved up the Cavs' defense. Love wasn't very useful defensively. In games 1 and 2, Steph takes just 26 shots and the Warriors' offense still hummed.

yes, other things had to happen to cut into the margin between the two teams. harrison barnes certainly helped the cavs cause. but at the end of the day, if steph numbers don't fall off a cliff, even just from the thunder series against what would seem to be a much better defense, none of it matters.

With regards to the Rockets series, I think KD was a double-edged sword with those matchups. The Warriors' offense was bogging down early in the 2018 series because KD was chasing mid-post ISO's.

and see, here it is. KD the problem. you don't get to struggle in the 2015 finals, then struggle in the 2016 finals and lose, then literally beg KD to come play with you, then sign KD and practically sweep the playoffs and say "this KD guy is really causing problems around here, isn't he?". hell, you had bob myers practically making fun of KD, AT A CHAMPIONSHIP RALLY THAT KD HELPED MAKE HAPPEN!!! ridiculous.

There's that infamous clip from that series off Kerr telling KD he needs to trust his teammates. Lo and behold, the Warriors get the ball in Steph's hands in the final games of the series and the offense starts humming again with KD in a more peripheral play-finishing role, rather than play-initiating.

so if kevin durant iso's, steph curry is rendered helpless? the claim is always that it was his team and his offense. that he fit with any and all comers. kevin durant iso's don't really seem like the graduate level course in trying to make it work. like somehow steph playing badly and KD playing well is somehow often translated into "really, it was KD making steph play poorly so the real blame is on KD, not on steph for playing poorly". it also seems a little weird, and this goes back to the impact numbers, that the warriors wanted KD but then basically just decided that KD needed to do all the fitting in and him ever doing anything he wanted was just messing with the great thing the warriors had going on.

also, curry struggled for 5 out of 7 games before taking off in the last 2. that's a long time to make no adjustment. and even more importantly, he stopped struggling once his playoff kryptonite chris paul was injured. his numbers really fell off every time he played him:

in the 2014 playoffs when he played chris paul, he was at -5.3 PER, -0.094 WS48, -3.0 BPM.
he really struggled in the first 5 games of the 2018 series with 24/6/5 on 56 TS%. based on his game score of 17.6 and a typical formula of PER = Game Score + 5, that would be a drop in PER of -5.6 to 22.6 and an unbelievable -11.5 TS% from the regular season.
and his numbers really fell off in the 2019 6 game series with 24/5/5 on 54 TS% with a game-score-implied -4.6 PER and another massive -10.1 TS%.
that's 18 games over 3 series and 5 seasons of really struggling when cp3 is around. 2 games without chris paul, 28/8/7 on 62 TS%.

It's also worth noting that Iguodala missed the final four games of that series and I think there's a pretty significant chance that the series ends earlier with him healthy.

yes, i know we must always note that. the 4 prime hall of famers being healthy wasn't good enough. also, as usual, mbah-a-moute might be a lesser player than iggy but was also even more injured and way worse. 2-15 in the series and couldn't make a layup before being out for the series and then only playing another 89 minutes in his entire career before being out of the league. iggy at least gave you 3 great games before being out. and mbah-a-moute was basically specifically signed to be an extra 3&D guy to guard the warriors so we didn't have to play gerald green or ryan anderson. also worth noting that the warriors defensive rating was actually better in the 4 games iggy didn't play, and it would be even if you just included the 2 games cp3 played without iggy. i get that iggy is good, but he's not just a blanket 7 or 8 points you can add onto the result of any game.

was even As for the 2019 Rockets' series, the Warriors' struggles again, I think were tied in part to KD. With KD healthy, I thought it was a coin-flip series. When he went down, I and many other Warriors fans felt weirdly confident that the Warriors would win that series.

so by halftime of game 6, the series was 5.5 games old. dividing the stats by 5.5, we get that steph was at 20.0 ppg, 4 apg, 4 rpg and an astounding 48 TS%. there is no way KD can be blamed for steph having one of the worst stretches of a playoff series, especially an important playoff series, of anyone we've voted in so far. at some point steph is responsible for steph. "hey KD, thanks for averaging like 35 ppg while steph couldn't figure out what he was doing, but we'll take it from here now that you're not holding us back".

and yes, with iguodala literally making the most 3's he ever made in a playoff game going 5 for 8 and klay adding another 7 3's in a "game 6 klay" performance, i would feel confident too if i knew i had a 12/21 on 3's performance coming from those 2 in a 6 point game.

also, did you guys feel weirdly confident about 3-peating without KD? this is another in the line of what seems to be ungrateful treatment of KD where it's almost like "man, mean old KD, why did he force his way onto our homegrown team? what, we asked him? oh well, either way, he's ruining our good time. so what if we won 2 titles with him, we can also just win without him. what, we lost without him? oh well, he still probably wasn't important, if anything he held us back".

For all of KD's considerable shot-making skills, his ego was definitely getting in the way of his performance in the 2018 and 2019 playoffs. My armchair psychoanalysis is that KD not getting the adulation he thought he deserved after 2017 made him more thirsty for credit,

isn't that what you are doing here in not giving him credit? isn't that what bob myers did in acting like KD wasn't even part of the team? the guy with back to back finals mvp's is getting clowned by the GM whose 2016 finals embarrassment KD helped erase?

To that point, in the 2019 WCSF you have that unbelievable fourth quarter of Game 6 where Steph puts the Rockets away spamming empty corner PNR's with Draymond. There were only two possessions where the Warriors did not score on those PNR's. If I recall, one of them was a lob or finish with enough contact that a foul could have been called. The Warriors were able to turn to and spam that PNR specifically because KD wasn't on the court clapping for the ball so he could vibe from the mid-post/baseline. KD is a great shot maker and can shoot over anyone but in terms of decision trees, a Curry empty-corner PNR with Dray has infinitely more outcomes: a Steph/Dray DHO, Steph ISO'ing after a switch, Dray getting a layup or hitting a shooter on the roll, Dray throwing a lob to the dunker spot cutter, so on and so forth. By comparison, KD getting the ball in the mid-post is probably going to end in a contested shot for KD and if he wants to pass the ball, he's got a much more limited expanse of the court to choose from.

well, KD on the team is also when the warriors had their biggest playoff offensive outperformances and steph could have presumably run any play he wanted while KD was in the game if he really wanted to. or in the 2015 or 2016 finals before they got KD. also, steph having one really good half after struggling for 5.5 games and it turns out steph is why they won seems a very favorable view for curry.

[lessthanjake]

so yes, teams do go to amazing lengths to stop curry. sometimes his teammates even get a wide open layup out of it. but his numbers go down in the playoffs. and not just points, but shooting and the warriors offense often goes down at the same time and often looks worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense) and sometimes they only survive thanks to injuries.

Okay, so I think this drills down to the crux of the point here. Decreases in box score numbers don’t really matter if teams are decreasing his box score numbers by gameplanning in a way that enables everyone else and Steph is therefore still having massive offensive impact. Your argument is basically that the additional enabling of others is not enough of a counterweight and that the Warriors offense goes down as a result. You further argue that that happens even more “against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren’t the best because of defense).”

At the outset, I think we can throw away the final point. I’ve provided data that gets at this exact question—how Steph’s offenses did against good opponents.

well you defined good as +4 SRS and whether they made the finals, even if it was a horrendous 2018 cleveland defense. and i've pointed out arguably the biggest series of steph's peak in the 2015 finals, the 2016 finals, the 2018 wcf, and the 2019 2nd round as series that either were (2015/16/18) or looked like they would be (2019) the warriors biggest series. and steph largely underperformed in all of them and his dominant team either lost (2016), won with major injury help (2015/18), or survived what looked like curry's worst series ever because KD averaged 35 ppg to keep them afloat.

You’d just explicitly said the Warriors “often look worse against their best opponents (even if those opponents aren't the best because of defense).” I then pointed out an analysis I did that got to that *exact* question, and you criticize inclusion of “a horrendous 2018 cleveland defense.” The criteria seems to keep shifting (not to mention that my analysis was for rORTG relative to opponent DRTG, so teams’ defense being bad or good was already controlled for).

Anyways, you say you’ve pointed out “arguably the biggest series” for Steph, but I’ve already pointed out to you before that there’s so many exceptions to that declaration that don’t fit your narrative that it makes the whole thing meaningless. What about the 2015 WCF? What about the 2016 WCF? What about the entire 2017 playoffs? What about the 2019 Finals? What about the entire 2022 playoffs? Your argument is basically just saying Steph underperformed in the biggest series by only defining the biggest series to be the ones you think he underperformed in! The reality is that, using an objective criteria of what constitutes a good team, the Warriors offense did quite well and was quite resilient against good teams.

i would say it's the very definitely of "find a way." these are steph's DRPM's leading up to and after 2022:

2018: -2.89
2019: -0.97
2021: 0.10
2022: +4.3!
2023: -1.48

so he never gets above 0.10 in any season and then, in year 13, just spikes to an elite defender with a massive +4.2 jump from the previous year before a -5.8 decline back the next year. just in time to save his worst offensive season and declare him the 3rd best player, even in a down year. granted, it was kind of a banner year in the curry household, with brother seth posting a +2.7, though he lost out to russell westbrook's +3.0. and they all lost out to defensive stalwart tyrese maxey's +4.74. admittedly, all of the DRPM's from that year are way above normal for the top guys so something seems to have changed in the calculation to inflate defense. but all that means is that if the calcs were the same as previous years, steph would have gone back down to his usual +0 in defense and be right back up there in offense. still 3rd overall.

Again, it was widely understood that Steph had his best defensive year in 2021-2022. This is not some weird thing picked up by impact metrics. It was a thing that was widely talked about all season. You are objecting that something people widely picked up on with their eye test was also picked up on by impact metrics and then saying that that’s a reason not to pay attention to impact metrics for Steph! And that’s after having previously said that we shouldn’t pay attention to impact metrics for Steph because you think that they *aren’t* responsive to Steph having offensive struggles (even though it turns out that they are). This is not a reasonable argument. You just won’t trust impact metrics about Steph unless they say he’s not that great.

is that the argument, even in a down year in year 13, steph is still 3rd best? if so, then it would appear he was like easily the best for a decade (which is what RPM says), or at worst just a smidge behind our project #1 lebron, and we should have voted him in way before this. and yet i don't appear alone in waiting until now to start considering him. because, much like with a few other players, the reality, even if it's really good, doesn't quite seem to measure up to what these impact metrics say.

Yes, he *was* clearly the most impactful player in the last decade. I’ve been making that point over and over—with mountains of proof. And he *certainly* was “at worst just a smidge behind our project #1 lebron” in the last decade. I don’t really see how anyone would argue that Steph has been anything less than that in the last decade. And yes, we should have voted him in before we did. Your argument here is basically “I must be right because there’s other people who agree with me.”

What is objected to is the more general assertion that he is much less impactful in the playoffs in general.

but if he's not, then why did the warriors lose in 2016? why did their +10 team in 2015 need injury luck to beat a cavs team where lebron was busy posting a sub-50 TS% playoffs and so we can't even claim that it was just some peak lebron performance? why did the most talented roster ever need chris paul to get hurt (i realize the warriors slacked off in the regular season and had a worse SRS but no one thinks they were the worse team)? why did they weirdly struggle with a worse version of the rockets in 2019 if steph's impact was still right there and KD was going off for most of the series? i mean at full throttle in the playoffs, these would seem to be easy wins for the warriors if steph's impact is as great as the regular season numbers would indicate.

Besides 2016, your argument here is essentially to say Steph must not be very impactful in the playoffs because his team won but it wasn’t always a total cakewalk. You’re legitimately arguing against Steph’s playoff performances on the basis that his team won some series’s but it took them 6 games, rather than being a dominant victory. That’s pretty obviously not very persuasive. And what’s really telling here is that, when the Warriors *were* totally dominant (i.e. 2017), you say that that doesn’t actually count in Steph’s favor because it was too easy. Basically, if the Warriors are completely dominant then it was too easy and we shouldn’t care about what Steph did, and if the Warriors are not completely dominant then it shows Steph isn’t as good in the playoffs. There is literally no outcome that you would allow Steph to get any credit for. Your arguments just construct a complete lose-lose scenario for him.

As for 2016, as I said in the post you quoted from, I don’t think anyone would say he was as impactful in those playoffs as he was in the regular season. But that’s one year. It’s not his whole playoff career.

Ultimately, the whole argument always just comes back to the 2016 Finals and then a bunch of really unpersuasive stuff where Steph is somehow not very impactful in the playoffs unless his team steamrolls everyone. Oh, and, when they DID steamroll everyone, he wasn’t impactful because it was too easy.

except it's not really redundancy when it all fits together. i think everyone would agree that steph and draymond are as perfect a pairing as we've essentially ever seen. maybe more talented duos, but certainly not better fitting. not only in their fit together, but how they fit into the league as a whole. klay and iggy just gives you more of a good thing. klay wasn't an on-ball player who needed his touches, he just happened to basically have the same off-ball skillset as curry. not because curry decided to become an off-ball player to help klay and draymond, but just because that's who he was. and that's who they were. and iggy's ability to pass the ball and play elite defense is basically impossible to be redundant. the only thing missing from iggy and draymond is shooting and then at that point, if they could shoot, the warriors would basically just be a perfect/unbeatable roster. and of course, this version of the warriors actually did lose and then got the one thing they might have been missing in iso scoring with KD, who then somehow got criticized as being unnecessary after he turned them into a juggernaut.

and even if you think the non-KD teams weren't super talented, who was supposed to beat them? the west of 2015 had harden somehow dragging the rockets to a #2 seed at 56 wins and then had the clippers with their usual injuries and a typical good-but-not-great memphis team. i guess the spurs maybe could have beaten them but they didn't even get there to face them. same with the 2016 spurs. and the team they lost to in the cavs had one player in love who was practically a liability by the time the finals rolled around.

Again, fit is not some exogenous variable. Steph Curry is extremely easy to fit with, because of how he plays. There’s really not been a single good player that’s been on the Warriors in the last decade that didn’t fit well with him. This is part of his greatness!

As for who might’ve beaten the non-KD Warriors, just to take a couple examples, do we not think the 2016 Thunder or 2022 Celtics were really good? Hell, I don’t even think the 2015 Rockets were less talented than the Warriors. The non-KD Warriors really aren’t that high up on the talent scale! And you don’t seem to disagree, but instead just argue that Steph should get little credit still because he was on a team that fit so well—ignoring that this is, in large part, because Steph himself was easy to fit with! You’re basically saying Steph shouldn’t get credit because the Warriors should’ve won and they should’ve won because Steph is so great!

but is it possible that it being a somewhat novel offense for a novel player makes it harder to replicate for the rest of the team and inflates steph's impact numbers?

That’s possible, except that this isn’t impact where the team is absolutely awful without him and very good with him. It’s impact where the team is okay without him and historically great with him. It’s not really suggestive of a system where the team just cannot function in the system without him. It’s more suggestive of a team that can function in the system without him and then when you add him to it they are historically great.

[OhayoKD]

I don't have Kobe in my top 20 (or 25) either, but to me it's a question of if Bird is top 30, or even top 50. Robinson, Duncan, Hakeem, Shaq, Dirk, etc, were all all-time greats.

You know, this board was quite ready to rebut against outsiders who claimed it was crazy that MJ wasn't #1, and that should be applauded.

But then, the fact that this take is just made passively, something that doesn't fit with the values of the other voters here, and no one outside of the person running the vote cares to make note of this.
..kind of shows that this board will only fight outlandish takes when it is about some players.

What's there really to say? Bird is not getting in this thread so I don't think it's proper to derail it to debate a rather out landish opinion.

There is already a lot of anti-Bird stuff outside of these threads recently, so I reckon the great Bird war will come soon enough.

I am trying to wrap my head around how rebutting outsiders not being able to tolerate opinions they disagree with(and mostly cannot be bothered to argue against) is somehow inconsistent with tolerating an opinion people may disagree with....

Ceiling is welcome to his outlandish opinions. As am I. And as are you. If you wish to ask for justification, no one is stopping you, but it is not a indictment on the board that opinions you find "outlandish" are tolerated

[homecourtloss]

And yes, we should have voted him in before we did.

At which spot do you think Curry should have been voted in?

[OhayoKD]

That’s possible, except that this isn’t impact where the team is absolutely awful without him and very good with him. It’s impact where the team is okay without him and historically great with him. It’s not really suggestive of a system where the team just cannot function in the system without him. It’s more suggestive of a team that can function in the system without him and then when you add him to it they are historically great.

Monta Ellis, Dlo, Poole, Kevin Durant... and then there were all those talented draft-picks who were supposed to allow the Warriors to persist after their co-stars arged...

As for Lebron, yeah Lebron was not voted #1 on the assumption what he's done the last 5 years was all-time worthy(2020 excepted). You can make a longevity case if you want(steph has that), but Steph being the standout for this period besides accumulative dependent on what metrics you want to look at(and a very poor method of data interpretation)

[HeartBreakKid]

You know, this board was quite ready to rebut against outsiders who claimed it was crazy that MJ wasn't #1, and that should be applauded.

But then, the fact that this take is just made passively, something that doesn't fit with the values of the other voters here, and no one outside of the person running the vote cares to make note of this.
..kind of shows that this board will only fight outlandish takes when it is about some players.

What's there really to say? Bird is not getting in this thread so I don't think it's proper to derail it to debate a rather out landish opinion.

There is already a lot of anti-Bird stuff outside of these threads recently, so I reckon the great Bird war will come soon enough.

I am trying to wrap my head around how rebutting outsiders not being able to tolerate opinions they disagree with(and mostly cannot be bothered to argue against) is somehow inconsistent with tolerating an opinion people may disagree with....

Ceiling is welcome to his outlandish opinions. As am I. And as are you. If you wish to ask for justification, no one is stopping you, but it is not a indictment on the board that opinions you find "outlandish" are tolerated

I'm not sure if you're responding to Luka or to me but to clarify

I am not saying that we should just brush someone off for having an outlier opinion. I'm trying to explain that just because someone said something that is considered outlandish about Bird and no one responded to it does not mean that there is a bias against Larry Bird.

It's likely that that person's opinion was just buried in a thread with thousands of words in it (I sure as heck did not notice it).

[OhayoKD]

What's there really to say? Bird is not getting in this thread so I don't think it's proper to derail it to debate a rather out landish opinion.

There is already a lot of anti-Bird stuff outside of these threads recently, so I reckon the great Bird war will come soon enough.

I am trying to wrap my head around how rebutting outsiders not being able to tolerate opinions they disagree with(and mostly cannot be bothered to argue against) is somehow inconsistent with tolerating an opinion people may disagree with....

Ceiling is welcome to his outlandish opinions. As am I. And as are you. If you wish to ask for justification, no one is stopping you, but it is not a indictment on the board that opinions you find "outlandish" are tolerated

I'm not sure if you're responding to Luka or to me but to clarify

I am not saying that we should just brush someone off for having an outlier opinion. I'm trying to explain that just because someone said something that is considered outlandish about Bird and no one responded to it does not mean that there is a bias against Larry Bird.

It's likely that that person's opinion was just buried in a thread with thousands of words in it (I sure as heck did not notice it).

Was not to you, I just got lazy

[lessthanjake]

And yes, we should have voted him in before we did.

At which spot do you think Curry should have been voted in?

Well, I think I started voting for him in the #7 thread, so probably around there. I’d have him above Hakeem too though, so maybe #6. I wouldn’t have voted him for #5 though.

That’s possible, except that this isn’t impact where the team is absolutely awful without him and very good with him. It’s impact where the team is okay without him and historically great with him. It’s not really suggestive of a system where the team just cannot function in the system without him. It’s more suggestive of a team that can function in the system without him and then when you add him to it they are historically great.

Monta Ellis, Dlo, Poole, Kevin Durant... and then there were all those talented draft-picks who were supposed to allow the Warriors to persist after their co-stars arged...

What is this list of players supposed to be? I think it’s supposed to be a list of players who did not fit well with Steph, but it’s just a blatantly absurd list. For instance, D’Angelo Russell and Steph Curry played a grand total of 74 minutes on the court together, in a season where Steph played just 6 games, so DLo’s time on the Warriors has essentially nothing to do with Steph one way or the other. Meanwhile, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry were the top two players on perhaps the greatest team ever—a team where Durant played arguably his best basketball of his career, on his way to two Finals MVPs. The fact that you mention his name here is just completely puzzling. And Poole worked quite well with Steph and the Warriors—being a key part of a title team soon after having been in the G-league—up until Draymond Green punched him in the face, which is obviously not an on-court fit thing. There’s perhaps an argument with Ellis, but he did not ever play at all with prime Steph or in the system that the Warriors have played for the last decade, so we don’t really know how he would fit with anything resembling the dynasty Warriors (also, worth noting that Ellis had a negative on-off in those years in non-Steph minutes, so he had serious impact issues unrelated to anything regarding Steph).

What talented draft picks are you talking about? James Wiseman, who had a -10.1 on-off when he went to the Pistons and had the Pistons be -17.1 with him on the court? It certainly seems like he’s just bad. Sometimes “talented draft picks” just aren’t good players. Meanwhile, Kuminga is 20 years old. If your argument is that players don’t fit with Steph or the Warriors system because a 20-year old #7 draft pick who was considered quite raw coming into the NBA is merely a meaningful rotation player that gets fringe playoff minutes, then you are really reaching.

More generally, the reality is that the Warriors haven’t been terrible without Steph on the court. He has a huge on-off not because the team collapses with him off the court, but because they are historically great with him on the court. That’s not reflective of a team that cannot function in the system without him. It’s reflective of a team that functions without him and then goes supernova with him.

[OhayoKD]

And yes, we should have voted him in before we did.

At which spot do you think Curry should have been voted in?

Well, I think I started voting for him in the #7 thread, so probably around there. I’d have him above Hakeem too though, so maybe #6. I wouldn’t have voted him for #5 though.

Monta Ellis, Dlo, Poole, Kevin Durant... and then there were all those talented draft-picks who were supposed to allow the Warriors to persist after their co-stars arged...

What is this list of players supposed to be? I think it’s supposed to be a list of players who did not fit well with Steph, but it’s just a blatantly absurd list. For instance, D’Angelo Russell and Steph Curry played a grand total of 74 minutes on the court together, in a season where Steph played just 6 games

Oh? so they staggered their minutes? Huh, wonder why.

And yes Steph played just 6 games. He may have played more if they hadn't realized they had no hope of doing anything that year(partially because their third most talented player, was not, a good fit with Steph)

[lessthanjake]

At which spot do you think Curry should have been voted in?

Well, I think I started voting for him in the #7 thread, so probably around there. I’d have him above Hakeem too though, so maybe #6. I wouldn’t have voted him for #5 though.

Monta Ellis, Dlo, Poole, Kevin Durant... and then there were all those talented draft-picks who were supposed to allow the Warriors to persist after their co-stars arged...

What is this list of players supposed to be? I think it’s supposed to be a list of players who did not fit well with Steph, but it’s just a blatantly absurd list. For instance, D’Angelo Russell and Steph Curry played a grand total of 74 minutes on the court together, in a season where Steph played just 6 games

Oh? so they staggered their minutes? Huh, wonder why.

And yes Steph played just 6 games. He may have played more if they hadn't realized they had no hope of doing anything that year(partially because their third most talented player, was not, a good fit with Steph)

This has to be about the biggest reach of an argument I’ve ever seen. Steph played 5 games that season (I said 6 on memory; it was actually 5), and it was only 4 games with Russell. You’re literally arguing against Steph based on the idea that he didn’t fit with someone he played 4 games with. Just completely ridiculous. And, while this is all just such a dumb point that I am not sure it’s even worth delving into at all, they actually didn’t stagger them in any abnormal way in those 4 games—two-thirds of Steph’s minutes in those games were with DLo. Anyways, you should take a step back and think about the points you’re making and wonder whether you think they actually make sense or whether you’re just arguing for the sake of it, because this is just absurd.

[LukaTheGOAT]

You know, this board was quite ready to rebut against outsiders who claimed it was crazy that MJ wasn't #1, and that should be applauded.

But then, the fact that this take is just made passively, something that doesn't fit with the values of the other voters here, and no one outside of the person running the vote cares to make note of this.
..kind of shows that this board will only fight outlandish takes when it is about some players.

What's there really to say? Bird is not getting in this thread so I don't think it's proper to derail it to debate a rather out landish opinion.

There is already a lot of anti-Bird stuff outside of these threads recently, so I reckon the great Bird war will come soon enough.

I am trying to wrap my head around how rebutting outsiders not being able to tolerate opinions they disagree with(and mostly cannot be bothered to argue against) is somehow inconsistent with tolerating an opinion people may disagree with....

Ceiling is welcome to his outlandish opinions. As am I. And as are you. If you wish to ask for justification, no one is stopping you, but it is not a indictment on the board that opinions you find "outlandish" are tolerated

Point A example:

You of all people were quick to question anyone who had Jordan top 2. Yet, have nothing about Bird not being a top 30 or event top 50. Lol, you of all people acting like you respect outside opinions, considering what you say about other board users off-line.

[Doctor MJ]

Oscar vs Kobe is the most straight forward to me. The thing about Kobe is that he really wasn't impact-oriented, and that's not meant as a criticism. The goal of the game is not to win every game by as many points as possible. It's to win games, and in particular, win playoff games. I do think Kobe played more effectively in the playoffs compared to the regular season on average, and I think his defensive focus had a lot to do with that. But while Kobe had a lot of playoff success, and in seasons where that was profound enough he tends to make my POY ballots, it didn't happen every year. He wasn't Duncan, and in seasons without that kind of playoff run, it really holds Kobe back.

i dont get this. If his game isnt impactful how did he win so much? doesn't he have top 10 corp? you also said bird has impressive impact but isnt that just from his rookie year. Bird had great teams and didn't win as much as kobe did , doesn't lead better o, and he looks worse in all the stats.

These are reasonable questions.

Let me start with a quote that isn't about Kobe, but which exemplifies what I mean by impact-oriented.

I would say Maya Moore, easily. We're different players, certainly. There are flow players, and there are impact players. I'm more of a flow player. But Maya impacts the game making a steal, blocking a shot. She's pretty much an impact player in every facet of the game.

So for context here that you may be aware of, but I really wouldn't assume of men's basketball fans in general:

UConn is the greatest women's college basketball program.

Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore are now considered essentially part of a UConn Mt. Rushmore along with Sue Bird & Breanna Stewart.

This quote is from 2011.

At the time when Taurasi said this, Taurasi wasn't just a UConn legend, but a WNBA MVP who had won 2 WNBA championships and the primary star of the best greatest offensive dynasty (by ORtg) in WNBA history. She'd accomplished enough, quickly enough that if you told her that before she was done she'd be considered the WNBA's GOAT, that people wouldn't have seen that as a bold statement...and of course she was voted by fans in an official WNBA event as the GOAT in 2021.

In terms of Taurasi's competitive advantage, the big thing is that she's seen as the greatest scorer and 3-point shooter in WNBA history. She also has the rep as the most clutch player in WNBA history, and while that's a thing we should always be skeptical of, she has since developed a similar rep for something else that's actually pretty clearly true:

Greatest single-elimination game player.

From 2016 to 2021, the WNBA adopted a system where lower seeded teams had to play through single-elimination rounds to get to the semifinals. Here's how Taurasi and Phoenix fared in that time frame just going by W/L to determine favorites - which admittedly is not always right.

2016: Upset win v Indiana. Upset win v New York.
2017: Favored win v Seattle. Upset win v Connecticut.
2018: Favored win v Dallas. Upset win v Connecticut.
2019: No Taurasi (Loss to Favored Chicago.)
2020: Favored win v Washington. Loss to Favored Minnesota.
2021: Favored win v New York. Upset win v Seattle.

So in the 5 years with Taurasi:
9-1 in these single-elimination rounds.
4-0 when favored
5-1 when underdog

Could this be luck? Sure, but it's pretty remarkable. While I'm at it, just so it's clear generally on a statistical level that Playoff Diana seems pretty real:

Career averages:
Regular Season: 19.2 PPG, 58.5% TS
Post-Season: 20.5 PPG, 59.9% TS
with PPG increasing in 7 of 11 playoff run

So if we grant the Taurasi's premise of "flow" vs "impact" players, while politely putting to the side her humility when calling Moore better than herself, I'd put forward this idea:

An impact-oriented player isn't necessarily greater than a flow-oriented player. If you shoot well enough, if you score well enough, you'll just keep adding actual impact (as identified by +/-) until you literally surpass the "impact player" at least in the moments where you can pull it off.

Obviously we have something of an ambiguity that's developed if one group tends to see "more of an impact player" as a analytical statement of value added while another thinks of it as just a style player, and so the terminology is problematic. We can talk further about what to do with that problem is we think it worthwhile, but I think the important thing here is understanding what Taurasi is talking about in terms of styles of play.

Here's how I'd try to elaborate it in my words:

A flow player is a player who a particular subset of skills that they are looking to exploit above all others as the opportunity avails, and can be said to require a type of patience, even if those patient moments are cardiovascularly intensive.

An impact player is a player looking to find and actualize near-immediate opportunities for impact as a matter of course. Such a player can benefit immensely from a high revving motor, but "patient" is generally not a word you'd associate with them...with interesting exceptions.

From that Taurasian perspective, I'd not just call Kobe Bryant a flow-oriented player, but also Steph Curry a flow-oriented player.

Who would be more of an impact player? I'd say guys like Jerry West and Larry Bird.

Let's note that I don't think it really works to slot in heliocentric players as either one of these categories, and that interestingly, I largely don't think they existed until recently in the WNBA (triple doubles really didn't used to be a thing in the W). Heliocentric players are greatly helped by patience, but also benefit from skill-preference-neutrality of the (so-called) impact players.

Okay, so, if we just accept this impact-oriented player parlance for the moment, what I'm saying in my above quote about Kobe is that while the style he played didn't have an ultra-high baseline level of impact, as exemplified by his +/- which I'll get into in a moment, I do believe he was able to "tighten up" his game at will through is prime. In Kobe's case I don't think that meant such a clear cut statistical scoring improvement, but I think his scoring was pretty resilient and I think that when he committed himself to man defense he was quite capable at it.

As you say, with Kobe winning as much as he did, should he really be blamed for pertaining to what might be termed "coasting" in the regular season? To which I'd say: In any given season, a player's performance in the playoffs can really paint over what happened in the regular season...but when that doesn't happen, the regular season generally defines season.

While I could understand a philosophy where you evaluate a guy primarily based on how good he was, along with how long he was that good, and don't really sweat the fact that some seasons never give you that playoff-mode guy, from the perspective I'm coming from, that would be effectively crediting the game with accomplishments he never accomplished.

Make sense? Feel free to ask a follow up.

Okay, let me point stats regarding the idea of "winning so much" pertaining to raw +/-. I understand that raw +/- is inherently biased by how good the team a guy is around you...which should give us a certain expectation for how many points a player's team outscored their opponents over their career. Where would you think Kobe would end up using all +/- from '96-97 to present?

To remind people who is in competition here, here are the guys who were voted Top 50 in the last go 'round who played the large majority of their time in this era we have data for:

Shaquille O'Neal
Jason Kidd
Kevin Garnett
Kobe Bryant
Steve Nash
Ray Allen
Tim Duncan
Chauncey Billups
Dirk Nowitzki
Paul Pierce
Pau Gasol
LeBron James
Dwyane Wade
Chris Paul
Kevin Durant
Russell Westbrook
Steph Curry
James Harden
Kawhi Leonard

That's 19 guys. I'll put in spoilers how these guys stack up by career +/-. If you've never really looked at this data before, I bet you'll be surprised.

(folks please don't respond unless you do read all of the spoilers)

Spoiler:

Tim Duncan 10000
LeBron James 8547
Steph Curry 6629
Dirk Nowitzki 6555
Chris Paul 6133
Shaquille O'Neal 5520 (missing first 4 years)
Steve Nash 5250
Kevin Garnett 5204 (missing first year)
Kevin Durant 5196
Kobe Bryant 4721
Kawhi Leonard 4562
James Harden 4261
Ray Allen 4061
Jason Kidd 3991 (missing first 2 years)
Paul Pierce 3488
Dwyane Wade 3253
Chauncey Billups 3231
Russell Westbrook 3065
Pau Gasol 2068

For those objecting because of his last few years, know that Kobe peaked after '12-13 at 5616.

Another super coarse metric I like to give an understanding of impact-as-a-matter-of-course is just counting the number of seasons a guy lead his team in +/- over the whole season. I'll list that number for the guys above in spoilers. Again, I know there's luck in these metrics, but I just encourage folks to really think about what you would expect for these guys without being protective of them. My original argument was not about knocking a guy, it was about talking about a thing that I think causes him to be more valuable at some times than others, which this kind of data can't show. Hence, deviation from expectation is a reason to think that there may be a cause such as the one I'm suggesting if it is dramatic enough.

Spoiler:

LeBron James 15
Dirk Nowitzki 14
Tim Duncan 10
Kevin Garnett 10
Chris Paul 10
Steve Nash 9
Steph Curry 8
Jason Kidd 8
Shaquille O'Neal 8 (1 is from Harvey Pollack regular season number which go back to '93-94, still leaving out Shaq's rookie year)
James Harden 6
Kevin Durant 5
Ray Allen 5
Paul Pierce 4
Russell Westbrook 4
Kawhi Leonard 4
Kobe Bryant 3
Dwyane Wade 3
Pau Gasol 2
Chauncey Billups 1

So yeah, I just can't believe Kobe is an unimpressive as the +/- makes him look to me. I believe he did have what we might call "impact resilience" that allowed him to be something closer to the level he is typically viewed as. How close? Well, I think that's one of the big questions everyone needs to chew on - I'm known for being lower than most on Kobe in general, but my point here isn't to convince people he's not that good, but that if the +/- data doesn't capture his true strength, I think we need to ask ourselves why.

As I said above, I tend to think of it as him "tightening up" his game, but I welcome greater depth in this scouting to state it more precisely. More than anything else, I'd be really surprised if there was nothing positive we could report about Playoff Kobe.

Last note(s):

Looking at this, I'm going to post part of this in a new thread in the WNBA board.

Also, ftr, while I think Taurasi's greatness is good evidence of a flow-oriented player being better than impact-players, I agree with Taurasi's assessment that Moore was better she was. Taurasi made that statement after Moore's college career before she'd played a game in the WNBA, and Moore would only play in the WNBA for 8 years, nevertheless, what she did in those 8 years is astonishing, and I expect I'll elaborate on that on the WNBA board one of these days as well.